British crime-fighters seeking IT weapons in Australia

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Last month's London bombings threw into sharp relief the need
for better information management to speed investigations and
prosecutions of terrorist and criminal activity.

The British criminal justice system is looking to Australia for
weapons for its IT armoury. Austrade, the Federal Government's
trade commission, showed products from 20 Australian IT companies
to John Suffolk, Britain's director-general of its criminal justice
information technology unit, who is in Australia. Among those
pitching are nSynergy, eLaw, Space Time Research, Neuragenix, the
Objective Corporation and Eden Technology.

A $5.18 billion project to update Britain's justice system by
2008 will speed inter-agency collaboration, reduce paperwork and
increase public trust.

Mr Suffolk talked to ASIO and justice departments such as
Victoria's, whose $45 million criminal justice enhancement program
is a model for Britain.

"We are trying to put victims and witnesses at the heart of the
system so they don't get passed from pillar to post and asked for
the same information again and again," says Mr Suffolk, who is
impressed by the integration of Australia's civil and family courts
with the criminal justice system.

"What seems to be very big is e-filing and doing things over the
web. The UK hasn't broadly gone through that."

"The main challenges we have faced relate to inter-agency
interactions where there are different technology platforms and
different regimes in the various jurisdictions," says Mr
Brooks.

David Lewis, CEO of Fulcrum Management, a supplier of forensic
computer equipment to the Australian Federal Police, says
law-enforcement agencies have diverse needs that buck a monolithic
approach.

Warren Richter, CEO of Melbourne's Space Time Research,
specialists in statistical processing, believes his pitch for a
British contract will succeed. Austrac, the federal agency in
charge of fraud detection and anti-money laundering, is a client.
"(Our) software enables an individual to see certain fields, but
only part of it," he says, adding that the next step is for
Austrade to crack open doors in Britain so he can demonstrate his
products to agencies and integrators such as IBM and Accenture.

Mr Suffolk says people and corporate cultures still have to be
dealt with: "In the old days of doing things, you passed the paper
file onto a chain; whereas now we are moving into a situation where
information is automatically flowing into systems.